Routledge Studies in Chinese Linguistics – serie

Nantong Chinese is an in-depth account of an interesting and endangered Sinitic language spoken in Nantong, China, in an area in the Northern Yangtze River Delta about 800 square kilometers in size and 105 kilometers northwest of the city of Shanghai. The Chinese language consists of several hundred local varieties known as Sinitic languages or Chinese dialects, each representing a unique linguistic system. This book offers a comprehensive and systematic insight into one such system that is even more complex and more interesting than standard Mandarin. The unique vocalization and other linguistic features of Nantong Chinese make it unintelligible to most Chinese people. All the important linguistic aspects of Nantong Chinese are covered, including its phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic subsystems.Nantong Chinese will be of interest to professionals and students in linguistics worldwide.

Prosodic Phonology of the Fuzhou Dialect: Domains and Rule Application is the first attempt to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Fuzhou phonological system from the perspective of prosodic phonology.It addresses the following issues: What prosodic constituents exist in the Fuzhou dialect and what kinds of roles they play in the Fuzhou phonological system; how to define the domain formation of these prosodic constituents in the Fuzhou dialect; what kinds of Fuzhou phonological phenomena make crucial reference to these prosodic constituents as the domain of application; and what implications does the study of the Fuzhou phonological system have for the prosodic phonology theory.This book is a valuable text for students and scholars in the field of Chinese dialectology, Min dialects, prosodic phonology, and phonology-morphosyntax interface.

This book challenges the current consensus on the analysis of wh-questions and reflexives from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. An integrated approach incorporating analyses of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge is proposed. It argues that the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions and reflexives are not purely syntactic in nature but are regulated by principles operating at the syntax-semantics interface. Two general principles underlying our knowledge of language and cognition are proposed in this work. One is the Principle of Locality, and the other is the Principle of Prominence. It shows that although wh-quantification and reflexivization belong to two different domains of study in generative grammar, their derivation and interpretation are basically constrained by the complex interaction between prominence and locality in grammar. The first part of the book discusses how wh-questions are formed and interpreted in Chinese and English and shows that the formation and interpretation of wh-questions are constrained by the interaction between prominence and locality. It is shown that in wh-interpretation prominence is used to define the set generators so as to licence other wh-words in the pair-list reading in multiple wh-questions. It also discusses wh-island effects in English and Chinese, and unlike previous claims made in the literature (cf. Huang 1982a, 1982b), it argues that the so-called wh-island effects in English are also observed in Chinese. The second part of the book investigates the role that prominence and locality play in reflexive binding. It is shown that in reflexive binding, the binding domain of the reflexive is defined by prominence. It proposes a unified account for both the noncontrastive compound reflexive and the bare reflexive in Chinese and shows that they are constrained by the same reflexive binding condition proposed in this work, though they employ different definitions of the most prominent NPs to determine their binding domains. Prominence and Locality in Grammar: The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Quesitons and Reflexives is an important theoretical contribution to the syntax-semantics interface studies and can serve as a valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the field of Chinese, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Diachronic Perspectives and Synchronic Variation in Southern Min aims to address a range of grammatical phenomena in Southern Min. The Sinitic languages show divergence not only in phonology but also in grammar. Together with Hakka, Yue and part of Wu, Min forms the two major Southern groups of Far Southern and Southeastern languages. There is a range of grammatical phenomena in Southern Min addressed here; the themes and theoretical issues covered in this book touch on a wide range of grammatical patterns of Southern Min from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives including comparatives, obligative and dynamic modals, formation of coordinate conjunctions from the comitative marker, the benefactive marker, the rise of the continuative aspect marker, grammaticalization of the verb of saying into a complementizer and purposives in Southern Min.This book is aimed at researchers and scholars working on and interested in Chinese linguistics.

Modern Chinese Grammar provides a comprehensive coverage of Chinese grammar through the clause-pivot theory and the double triangle approach, first proposed by Fuyi Xing in 1996. Translated into English for the first time, the book is widely regarded by linguists as a seminal text, and ground-breaking in linguistics research. The book contains discussion of the topics which are essential to Chinese grammar, from words and phrases, to complex sentences and sentence groups. It addresses such controversial issues as word class identification, the distinction between words and phrases, and between clauses and complex sentences. The book also shows, through a wealth of examples, how the clause-pivot theory and the double triangle approach can be applied productively in grammatical studies. Modern Chinese Grammar: A Clause-Pivot Theoretical Approach is an essential purchase for researchers and graduate students of Chinese grammar and syntax.

Introducing the English translations of 8 selected research articles originally written in Chinese by Professor Yuan Yulin, Cognition-based Studies on Chinese Grammar is an essential reading for researchers in Chinese syntax. Yuan Yulin is one of the very first Chinese scholars who introduced cognitive sciences into the study of Chinese language some twenty years ago, and his work is well-known and highly regarded in China for its originality and theoretical contribution. The collection covers the core of his engagement with Chinese language studies, ranging from lexical exploration to grammatical discussion. Cognition-based Studies on Chinese Grammar is designed for students or researchers who specialize in the Chinese language, contemporary Chinese grammar and cognitive linguistics. It can also serve as a reference book for instructors or teachers engaged in Chinese language pedagogy or in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language.

Nantong Chinese is an in-depth account of an interesting and endangered Sinitic language spoken in Nantong, China, in an area in the Northern Yangtze River Delta about 800 square kilometers in size and 105 kilometers northwest of the city of Shanghai. The Chinese language consists of several hundred local varieties known as Sinitic languages or Chinese dialects, each representing a unique linguistic system. This book offers a comprehensive and systematic insight into one such system that is even more complex and more interesting than standard Mandarin. The unique vocalization and other linguistic features of Nantong Chinese make it unintelligible to most Chinese people. All the important linguistic aspects of Nantong Chinese are covered, including its phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic subsystems.Nantong Chinese will be of interest to professionals and students in linguistics worldwide.

The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics provides an in-depth exploration of a variety of interface phenomena in Chinese, a non-inflectional language, where to a large extent word order constrains its interpretation and defines its grammatical functions. Under the Dynamic Syntax approach, which takes the incremental left-to-right processing of linguistic forms to be a fundamental part of characterizing the relation between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation, a straightforward explanation is provided. The study features detailed analysis of a range of key grammatical constructions such as topic, passive, copular and cleft, where previous analyses were sought in pure syntactic, semantic or pragmatic terms. Clear and straightforward throughout, The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics will be of interest to graduate students and scholars of Chinese, linguistics and cognitive science.

This book centers on theoretical issues of phonology-syntax interface based on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects. It uses patterns in tone sandhi to study how speech should be divided into domains of various sizes or levels. Tone sandhi refers to tonal changes that occur to a sequence of adjacent syllables or words. The size of this sequence (or the domain) is determined by various factors, in particular the syntactic structure of the words and the original tones of the words. Chinese dialects offer a rich body of data on tone sandhi, and hence great evidence for examining the phonology-syntax interface, and for examining the resulting levels of domains (the prosodic hierarchy).Syntax-Phonology Interface: Argumentation from Tone Sandhi in Chinese Dialects is an extremely valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese.

This book addresses intensification and modal necessity in Mandarin Chinese.Intensification is used in this book to describe the speaker’s emphasis on a proposition, because, by emphasizing on a proposition, the speaker intensifies the degree of his/her confidence and affirmativeness toward the truth of a proposition, cf. the distinction between ‘weaker’ and ‘stronger’. Modal necessity discussed in this book refers either to the speaker’s certainty regarding the truth of an inference, judgment or stipulation, that is, epistemic necessity or to the speaker’s certainty concerning the obligatoriness of a proposition, based on rules or regulations, i.e., deontic necessity. This book examines a series of lexical items in Mandarin Chinese that express either intensification or modal necessity, provides a unified semantics and also presents how these lexical items are semantically distinct.Intensification and Modal Necessity in Mandarin Chinese is aimed at instructors, researchers and post-graduate students of Chinese Linguistics.

English-based Mandarin loanwords are commonly used in Chinese people’s daily lives. Mandarin Loanwords demonstrates how English phonemes map into Mandarin phonemes through Mandarin loanwords adaptation. The consonantal adaptations are the most important in the analyses, and vowel adaptation and tonal adaptation is also considered. Through the analysis, it is proven that the functions of phonology and phonetics play a significant role in Mandarin loanword adaptation, however the functions of other factors, such as semantic functions of Chinese characters and English orthography, are also discussed. Additionally, the phonetic symbolization of Chinese characters is mentioned.

Partition and Quantity: Numeral Classifiers, Measurement, and Partitive Constructions in Mandarin Chinese presents an in-depth investigation into the semantic and syntactic properties of Chinese classifiers and conducts a comprehensive examination on the use of different quantity constructions in Chinese. This book echoes a rapid development in the past decades in Chinese linguistics research within the generative framework on Chinese classifier phrases, an area that has emerged as one of the most cutting-edge themes in the field of Chinese linguistics. The book on the one hand offers a closer scrutiny on empirical data and revisits some long-lasting research problems, such as the semantic factor bearing on the formation of Chinese numeral classifier constructions, the (non-)licensing of the linker de (的) in between the numeral classifier and the noun, and the conditions regulating the use of pre-classifier adjectives. On the other hand, particular attention is paid to the issues that have been less studied or gone unnoticed in previous studies, including a (more) fine-grained subcategorization of Chinese measurement constructions, the multiple grammatical roles played by the marker de (的) in different numeral classifier constructions, the formation and derivation of Chinese partitive constructions, etc.

The term Sino-Korean may refer to either the phonological system or vocabulary in Korean that is of Chinese origin. Along with the borrowing of Chinese characters, the Chinese readings of characters must also have been transmitted into Korean. A Study of Sino-Korean Phonology aims to contribute to the field of Sino-Korean phonology by re-examining the origin and layers of Sino-Korean pronunciations from a loanword phonology perspective. The central issues of this book include an ongoing discussion on the questions of which Chinese dialect Sino-Korean is based on and how the source form in Chinese was adapted into Korean. Last is an in-depth analysis of the layers of Sino-Korean.

The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity focuses on the semantic structure of Chinese classifiers under the cognitive linguistics framework, and the implications thereof on linguistic relativity and language acquisition. It examines the semantic correlation between a given classifier and its associated nouns. Nouns in Chinese, which are assigned specific classifiers according to their selected characteristics, reflect the process of human categorization. The concrete categories formed by the relationship between nouns and classifiers may serve to explain the conceptual structure of the Chinese language and certain underlying aspects of culture and human cognition.Song Jiang is Assistant Professor of Chinese for the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at university of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

This monograph is a translation of two seminal works on corpus-based studies of Mandarin Chinese words and parts of speech. The original books were published as two pioneering technical reports by Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing group (CKIP) at Academia Sinica in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Since then, the standard and PoS tagset proposed in the CKIP report have become the de facto standard in Chinese corpora and computational linguistics, in particular in the context of traditional Chinese texts. This new translation represents and develops the principles and theories originating from these pioneering works. The results can be applied to numerous fields; Chinese syntax and semantics, lexicography, machine translation and other language engineering bound applications.Suitable for graduate and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese, Mandarin Chinese Words and Parts of Speech provides a comprehensive survey of the issues around wordhood and PoS.

Exhaustivity, Contrastivity, and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures investigates the semantics of the cleft and cleft-related structures in Mandarin, which, over several decades, have presented analytical challenges for semantic theory. The goal of this book, in broad terms, is three-fold: (i) to figure out what clefting adds to the semantics of a sentence; (ii) to set apart the meaning and the discourse function of each type of cleft-related structure; and (iii) to provide a uniform analysis of Mandarin clefts and their related structures. More specifically, it addresses the following questions: (i) what is the semantics of Mandarin clefts? (ii) what do exhaustivity and contrastivity contribute to the meaning of clefts? (iii) what are the semantic (or pragmatic) factors that determine the variation of clefts, related structures, and canonical sentences? and (iv) cross-linguistically speaking, how do Mandarin shi...de cleft and its related structures differ from similar constructions such as English it-cleft, French c’est cleft, and German es-cleft?This book will be informative for linguists who are working on cleft constructions and focus on sensitive structures cross-linguistically, and those interested in experimental semantics and pragmatics.

Exhaustivity, Contrastivity, and the Semantics of Mandarin Cleft-related Structures investigates the semantics of the cleft and cleft-related structures in Mandarin, which, over several decades, have presented analytical challenges for semantic theory. The goal of this book, in broad terms, is three-fold: (i) to figure out what clefting adds to the semantics of a sentence; (ii) to set apart the meaning and the discourse function of each type of cleft-related structure; and (iii) to provide a uniform analysis of Mandarin clefts and their related structures. More specifically, it addresses the following questions: (i) what is the semantics of Mandarin clefts? (ii) what do exhaustivity and contrastivity contribute to the meaning of clefts? (iii) what are the semantic (or pragmatic) factors that determine the variation of clefts, related structures, and canonical sentences? and (iv) cross-linguistically speaking, how do Mandarin shi...de cleft and its related structures differ from similar constructions such as English it-cleft, French c’est cleft, and German es-cleft?This book will be informative for linguists who are working on cleft constructions and focus on sensitive structures cross-linguistically, and those interested in experimental semantics and pragmatics.

Lexical Ontological Semantics introduces ontological methods into lexical semantic studies with the aim of giving impetus to various fields of endeavours which envision and model the semantic network of a language. Lexical ontological semantics (LOS) provides a cognition-based computation-oriented framework in which nouns and predicates are described in terms of their semantic knowledge and models the mechanism in which the noun system is coupled with the predicate system. It expands the scope of lexical semantics, updates methodologies to semantic representation, guides the construction of semantic resources for natural language processing, and develops new theories for human-machine interactions and communications.

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language.Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language teachers Association (now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in the field of Chinese linguistics.

English-based Mandarin loanwords are commonly used in Chinese people’s daily lives. Mandarin Loanwords demonstrates how English phonemes map into Mandarin phonemes through Mandarin loanwords adaptation. The consonantal adaptations are the most important in the analyses, and vowel adaptation and tonal adaptation is also considered. Through the analysis, it is proven that the functions of phonology and phonetics play a significant role in Mandarin loanword adaptation, however the functions of other factors, such as semantic functions of Chinese characters and English orthography, are also discussed. Additionally, the phonetic symbolization of Chinese characters is mentioned.

Prosody is one of the core components of language and speech, indicating information about syntax, turn-taking in conversation, types of utterances, such as questions or statements, as well as speakers' attitudes and feelings. This edited volume takes studies in prosody on Asian languages as well as examples from other languages. It brings together the most recent research in the field and also charts the influence on such diverse fields as multimedia communication and SLA. Intended for a wide audience of linguists that includes neighbouring disciplines such as computational sciences, psycholinguists, and specialists in language acquisition, Prosodic Studies is also ideal for scholars and researchers working in intonation who want a complement of information on specifics.

Locality in Grammar: From Narrow Syntax to Interfaces investigates the operation of locality conditions in syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective.It is claimed that there are two different types of locality conditions. One is the Generalized Minimality Condition (GMC), and the other is the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). This book demonstrates that these locality conditions play different roles in different computational components of human language, and, therefore, cannot be unified as one constraint as proposed in the literature.The main idea of the book is that the two different locality conditions are sensitive to the difference between syntactic derivation and semantic interpretation and that of overt and covert syntactic derivations. Further investigation shows a more fine-grained distinction must be made between syntactic computations. It is true that GMC does not constrain overt syntactic derivations and PIC does not play a role in semantic interpretations; however, they both regulate covert syntactic computations.This book will inform postgraduate students and scholars in the field of linguistics.

Locality in Grammar: From Narrow Syntax to Interfaces investigates the operation of locality conditions in syntax and semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective.It is claimed that there are two different types of locality conditions. One is the Generalized Minimality Condition (GMC), and the other is the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). This book demonstrates that these locality conditions play different roles in different computational components of human language, and, therefore, cannot be unified as one constraint as proposed in the literature.The main idea of the book is that the two different locality conditions are sensitive to the difference between syntactic derivation and semantic interpretation and that of overt and covert syntactic derivations. Further investigation shows a more fine-grained distinction must be made between syntactic computations. It is true that GMC does not constrain overt syntactic derivations and PIC does not play a role in semantic interpretations; however, they both regulate covert syntactic computations.This book will inform postgraduate students and scholars in the field of linguistics.

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese is among the first books to try to incorporate both advanced linguistic and acquisition perspectives to show how eight sentence-final particles are represented in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese. This book will inform researchers of the general construction of the right periphery in L2 grammars. Drawing on up-to-date theoretical frameworks and findings from advanced empirical studies, it sketches the general picture of the periphery that these particles occupy in English-Chinese interlanguages. Readers will grasp the problems and difficulties, and particularly the ambiguities, which learners of Chinese must grapple with in the process of acquiring sentence-final particles. Possible influential factors underlying the acquisition process are explicitly discussed as well. Researchers will also find insights in the advanced methodologies and statistics that are used to study Chinese. The book will be illuminating for researchers interested in SLA, linguists of generative theories, and educators teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese is among the first books to try to incorporate both advanced linguistic and acquisition perspectives to show how eight sentence-final particles are represented in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese. This book will inform researchers of the general construction of the right periphery in L2 grammars. Drawing on up-to-date theoretical frameworks and findings from advanced empirical studies, it sketches the general picture of the periphery that these particles occupy in English-Chinese interlanguages. Readers will grasp the problems and difficulties, and particularly the ambiguities, which learners of Chinese must grapple with in the process of acquiring sentence-final particles. Possible influential factors underlying the acquisition process are explicitly discussed as well. Researchers will also find insights in the advanced methodologies and statistics that are used to study Chinese. The book will be illuminating for researchers interested in SLA, linguists of generative theories, and educators teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.

Prosodic Phonology of the Fuzhou Dialect: Domains and Rule Application is the first attempt to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Fuzhou phonological system from the perspective of prosodic phonology.It addresses the following issues: What prosodic constituents exist in the Fuzhou dialect and what kinds of roles they play in the Fuzhou phonological system; how to define the domain formation of these prosodic constituents in the Fuzhou dialect; what kinds of Fuzhou phonological phenomena make crucial reference to these prosodic constituents as the domain of application; and what implications does the study of the Fuzhou phonological system have for the prosodic phonology theory.This book is a valuable text for students and scholars in the field of Chinese dialectology, Min dialects, prosodic phonology, and phonology-morphosyntax interface.

Diachronic Perspectives and Synchronic Variation in Southern Min aims to address a range of grammatical phenomena in Southern Min. The Sinitic languages show divergence not only in phonology but also in grammar. Together with Hakka, Yue and part of Wu, Min forms the two major Southern groups of Far Southern and Southeastern languages. There is a range of grammatical phenomena in Southern Min addressed here; the themes and theoretical issues covered in this book touch on a wide range of grammatical patterns of Southern Min from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives including comparatives, obligative and dynamic modals, formation of coordinate conjunctions from the comitative marker, the benefactive marker, the rise of the continuative aspect marker, grammaticalization of the verb of saying into a complementizer and purposives in Southern Min.This book is aimed at researchers and scholars working on and interested in Chinese linguistics.

Prosody is one of the core components of language and speech, indicating information about syntax, turn-taking in conversation, types of utterances, such as questions or statements, as well as speakers' attitudes and feelings. This edited volume takes studies in prosody on Asian languages as well as examples from other languages. It brings together the most recent research in the field and also charts the influence on such diverse fields as multimedia communication and SLA. Intended for a wide audience of linguists that includes neighbouring disciplines such as computational sciences, psycholinguists, and specialists in language acquisition, Prosodic Studies is also ideal for scholars and researchers working in intonation who want a complement of information on specifics.

This book challenges the current consensus on the analysis of wh-questions and reflexives from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. An integrated approach incorporating analyses of the interaction between different levels of linguistic knowledge is proposed. It argues that the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions and reflexives are not purely syntactic in nature but are regulated by principles operating at the syntax-semantics interface. Two general principles underlying our knowledge of language and cognition are proposed in this work. One is the Principle of Locality, and the other is the Principle of Prominence. It shows that although wh-quantification and reflexivization belong to two different domains of study in generative grammar, their derivation and interpretation are basically constrained by the complex interaction between prominence and locality in grammar. The first part of the book discusses how wh-questions are formed and interpreted in Chinese and English and shows that the formation and interpretation of wh-questions are constrained by the interaction between prominence and locality. It is shown that in wh-interpretation prominence is used to define the set generators so as to licence other wh-words in the pair-list reading in multiple wh-questions. It also discusses wh-island effects in English and Chinese, and unlike previous claims made in the literature (cf. Huang 1982a, 1982b), it argues that the so-called wh-island effects in English are also observed in Chinese. The second part of the book investigates the role that prominence and locality play in reflexive binding. It is shown that in reflexive binding, the binding domain of the reflexive is defined by prominence. It proposes a unified account for both the noncontrastive compound reflexive and the bare reflexive in Chinese and shows that they are constrained by the same reflexive binding condition proposed in this work, though they employ different definitions of the most prominent NPs to determine their binding domains. Prominence and Locality in Grammar: The Syntax and Semantics of Wh-Quesitons and Reflexives is an important theoretical contribution to the syntax-semantics interface studies and can serve as a valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the field of Chinese, linguistics, and cognitive science.